SURFEIT • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Surfeit

Translators

Dictionaries

Courses

Other

Home

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/sˈərfət/ Listen

noun

Surfeit n.

Excess in eating and drinking. "Let not Sir Surfeit sit at thy board." "Now comes the sick hour that his surfeit made."

Fullness and oppression of the system, occasioned often by excessive eating and drinking. "To prevent surfeit and other diseases that are incident to those that heat their blood by travels."

Disgust caused by excess; satiety. "Matter and argument have been supplied abundantly, and even to surfeit."

verb

Surfeit v. t. (past & past part. surfeited; pres. part. surfeiting)

To feed so as to oppress the stomach and derange the function of the system; to overfeed, and produce satiety, sickness, or uneasiness; often reflexive; as, to surfeit one's self with sweets.

To fill to satiety and disgust; to cloy; as, he surfeits us with compliments.

Surfeit v. i.

To load the stomach with food, so that sickness or uneasiness ensues; to eat to excess. "They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing."

To indulge to satiety in any gratification.

See images of 'Surfeit'

Etymology of 'Surfeit'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Surfeit" Quotes from Famous Books

... slowly climbed this ridge through pastures where cows with deep-toned bells were rising from the dew on the grass, and where one or two little cottages and a village already sent up smoke. All the way up I was thinking of the surfeit of religion I had had the night before, and also of how I had started that morning without bread or coffee, which was ...

— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... cried. 'Justice is a slippery dame, and hath a two-edged sword in her hand. We may have enough of justice in our character as rebels to give us a surfeit of it. I would fain overtake these robbers that we may relieve them of their spolia opima, together with any other wealth which they may have unlawfully amassed. My learned friend the Fleming layeth it down that ...

— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... evenings out of the seven which God has created in the week. I am the mainstay of the music shops. At Paris there are drawing-rooms which exactly resemble the musical snuff-boxes of Germany. They are a sort of continuous orchestra to which I regularly go in search of that surfeit of harmony which my wife calls a concert. But most part of the time my wife keeps herself buried ...

— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... small number were pardoned on account of their youth, and a few individuals who effected their escape when led to the gallows, were not pursued. The fact that the townspeople almost connived at the escape of these desperadoes showed that there had been a surfeit of hangings in Rotterdam. It is moreover not easy to distinguish with exactness the lines which in those days separated regular sea belligerents, privateers, and pirates from each other. It had been laid down ...

— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... palate was jaded by a surfeit of the pungent horrors of Walpole's successors, would probably have found The Castle of Otranto an insipid romance and would have lamented that he did not make more effective use of his supernatural machinery. His story ...

— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

More quotes...